Work Text:
At a few feet long and weighing several pounds, the modified De-Mat Gun required some strength to carry, but the weapon felt even heavier in the Doctor’s arms. She paid no attention to the bramble cutting into her legs as she pushed through the forest; her focus was on suppressing the nagging instinct that threatened to steal her away from what she had to do.
After trekking half a mile beneath the searing heat of the twin suns – a dispassionate inferno that seared her scalp even beneath the canopy of the trees – the Doctor emerged onto the cliffside. In almost every direction, a similarly green landscape stretched towards the horizon in parallel with the hazy golden hues of the endless sky. The Doctor recovered her bearings and moved a short distance further along the open space, shifting awkwardly over rocky terrain with the ungainly weapon kept close to her body. She allowed herself a small smile as she came upon the vantage point. The relief quickly gave way to astonishment, however, as the first sign of civilisation graced her wide eyes.
From where she stood, looking down and across from several thousand metres, the congregation of buildings was small enough to fit behind her thumb. Their stone edifices and simple architecture conveyed what the Doctor already knew; the planet was still primitive, its people still developing their technologies and cultures, but the information she had been given prior to arriving failed to prepare her for how beautiful it was.
‘You never learn,’ she chuckled. The Doctor was without company, but she learned long ago to her dismay that she was never alone. ‘Next time you put together an assignment,’ she said, speaking to the air and the ears beyond it, ‘throw in some pictures. It’ll give me something to look forward to, at least.’
There was no reply or indication of acknowledgement, but the Doctor knew better than to loiter in her current circumstances. She glanced back at the buildings, at the intricate patterns along the outer wall surrounding the settlement, and found herself wondering what they would look like up close. She dismissed the thought as quickly as it came to her and, with a sigh, assumed her position.
Lying on her stomach – and trying not to think about how the dust was ruining her favourite shirt – she positioned the De-Mat against a small rock and looked through the scope. The optics were pristine, designed exclusively for the Division with specifications capable of sighting a target in the next spatial dimension. But its features mattered little to the Doctor—she was here for a reason, and the reason was all she could bring herself to think about.
She panned across the walls of the settlement and tilted up its many levels. It was a humble yet sturdy fortification, but it was evident that its construction was not exclusively practical. The brickwork bore ornate carvings with smatterings of colour in patterns and symbols the Doctor could not decipher; murals and artwork caked its lower half, the intricate designs disrupted irregularly by painted hands whose smeared and varied dimensions suggested the work of rambunctious children.
The Doctor twisted a dial on the scope and watched as the visual display shifted to depict the sights behind the wall. Most of the buildings were squat and modest with flat rooftops that either overlapped onto one another or were connected through short bridges of rope and wood. In every building, through every window, the people were at peace. Children ran in and out of their houses, playing games of every kind as they screamed and laughed while parents leaned against doorways in conversation with their neighbours.
This was a happy and loving community. The Doctor tried not to think about it.
After several minutes, the target appeared. He walked among the thronging masses in one of the more popular streets, fenced in with the rabble by the stalls lining the fronts of every shop. Each of the vendors seemed to know him by name, calling out to him and asking about his family or his own wellbeing. With each exchange of jokes and goodwill, his green skin shimmered in the sunlight as laughter rang sweetly from his fanged mouth—he was as much a part of this community as everyone else.
The Doctor watched him peel away from the crowd into an alley dense with shadow. He climbed a clumsy set of stairs and returned into the light of the suns with a smile that only grew wider as he lay down on the warm stone of the rooftop. As he closed his eyes and rested his hands behind his head, the Doctor realised why the Division insisted on providing nothing more than a description.
They knew she could never kill a child.
The assignment was shrouded in such secrecy that she was never even given the name of their planet, but, despite knowing little about his species, the Doctor could tell the boy was still an adolescent. She had seen playfulness and confidence like his in the young of countless peoples across the universe. In his face, she saw the children of Gallifrey, Time Lord and Shobogan alike; in his laughter, she could hear the melody of a thousand nursery rhymes and the love of the parents who sang them; in this young boy, the Doctor saw an innocent child at the mercy of someone beyond his comprehension—she saw herself and the life she never had.
A breath that she had forgotten to let go slipped through her parted lips. The tension in her finger faded and the pressure of the trigger against it followed. The Doctor let the De-Mat clatter to the ground as she rose to her feet; she dusted off her shirt and fixed her collar, grimacing at the weapon whenever it registered in the corner of her eye. From her jacket pocket, she produced her glasses and squinted in the direction of the distant community. She spared another glance towards the sky and her spectators before starting down the path towards the settlement.
The journey from the cliffside was swift yet still mired by thick vegetation, a feature the Doctor was thankful for as she drew nearer to the fortifications. She kept close to the trees and bushes, watching as what appeared to be soldiers patrolled the length of the wall, and waited for an opportunity. When two of the soldiers began a conversation with each other, the Doctor dashed across the open space and pressed herself flush against the stone.
‘Why can’t you just give us a perception filter as standard?’ she whispered. ‘Oh, let me guess. “Because it wasn’t deemed necessary for your mission.”’ The Doctor rolled her eyes, ‘Like anything ever goes to plan with you lot.’ From a subtle space by her breast pocket, nestled between her glasses and her TARDIS key, the Doctor produced a small metallic device with a smirk. ‘There you are.’ Hovering her thumb over a button on its end, she closed her eyes, ‘Short-range, don’t fail me now.’
With a sudden fizz of energy, the Doctor found herself opening her eyes on the other side of the wall. She suppressed a cheer, pocketed the teleporter, and quickly studied her immediate surroundings. There was a distance no greater than five metres between the wall and the nearest building. The small space was made smaller by the several stacks of crates piled haphazardly around her; the ground was covered by loose sheeting whose stained fabric bore no difference to the dirt underneath it. From the other side of the building, she could hear the bustle of a market and gritted her teeth.
Taking one of the sheets from the floor, the Doctor took a deep breath and draped it over herself as a makeshift cloak. She coughed at the stench ‘Okay, maybe technology does matter. What I wouldn’t give for a washing machine…’
The crowd paid no attention to the Doctor as she moved among them, too engrossed in their own conversations to even recognise she was there. She followed the path that the young boy walked and, eventually, ascended the same stairs to find him as he was, still basking in the suns with a smile on his face.
The Doctor watched him carefully, struggling to reconcile the information she was given with the sight before her own eyes. Then, as though he could hear the workings of her mind, the boy sat up and turned around. ‘Who are you?’ he asked without a trace of fear in his voice.
She shrugged off the sheet and, with it, what few pretences she had fell away. ‘I’m the Doctor.’
‘Oh. Am I ill? Have I got heat sickness again? I told dad I was better now.’
‘No, it’s not that.’
‘Then what’s wrong? It’s not mum, is it?’
‘Why would it be your mum?’
‘I don’t know,’ he shrugged. ‘I just don’t know why else a doctor would come and find me.’
The Doctor walked slowly towards him and sat cross-legged by his side. ‘Nobody’s ill,’ she began. ‘Look, if we’re being honest—’
‘We should always be honest,’ he interrupted. ‘That’s what we’re taught when we’re kids.’
She smiled, ‘You still are a kid. You still are…’
‘I’m sorry, doctor, but I don’t think I understand.’
‘That’s all right,’ she said to herself. ‘Neither do I.’
‘You don’t look like anyone I’ve met before,’ the boy confessed. ‘And, I’m sorry if it’s rude, but… Well, you don’t sound like anyone I’ve met before either.’
‘I get that a lot. But, do you know what the good thing about that is? It means there’s only one of me. There’s only one of you, too. We’re unique.’
‘Unique?’
‘That’s right. Unique. One of a kind. There’s nobody out there like us.’
‘Is that why you came to find me?’ he asked. ‘Because I’m unique?’
Despite her efforts to the contrary, the Doctor was reminded of what she had been told on Gallifrey. The wishes of the High Council were spoken through the words of the Division, and their instructions were clear; she was imprisoned between the layers of Time Lord bureaucracy and given no alternative but to fulfil the objective of her assignment.
Seeing the innocent face of the young boy, the Doctor forced herself to remember why she was here. She was not sent to this planet to admire its people and their accomplishments. She was here to avert a terrible future.
‘Yes,’ the Doctor finally said. ‘That’s exactly why I’m here.’
‘And where did you come from? How far away?’ he asked.
She faced away from the suns and pointed at an empty part of the sky. ‘Do you see there?’ she asked. ‘When the suns go down and it gets dark, do you see the lights in the sky?’
‘The little fires?’
‘Exactly.’
The boy was incredulous. ‘You come from the fire?’
The Doctor chuckled, ‘I wish. No, I’m from a world. A planet, just like you. But it’s a very, very long way from here.’
‘Then how did you get here?’
An infectious grin played across the Doctor’s face. ‘And that,’ she said, ‘is how every great story starts, isn’t it?’
The fiery rays of the second sun sparkled against the silver leaves. A light breeze moved the branches, but everything in the colonnade was silent as Gat gazed out at the garden. The sturdy tree in front of her was once a sapling; she had watched it grow steadily over the centuries, changing so gradually that its transformation only registered on the solemn mornings as she humoured a rare silence in the Capitol. The roots were knotted and firm in the ground, and though the tree had reached its full height long ago, its branches still dared to touch the sky. It was a relic determined to endure.
The clicking of boots against the stone floor pulled Gat from her contemplation. She turned to see the Doctor approach with her typical swagger and infuriating disregard for secrecy. ‘I take it you’ve got a point you want to make,’ she called out to Gat.
‘Several.’
‘It’s a long walk,’ she said, gesturing to the vast and empty space around them. ‘If you start now, we might be done by the time I get there.’
Gat folded her arms and stood in silence.
‘You sure know how to keep a girl waiting,’ the Doctor said when she stopped.
‘And you seem an expert at going against the brief.’
The Doctor rolled her eyes. ‘Look, Gat, I don’t know why you care so much about this.’
‘Of course you don’t!’ she hissed. ‘Because you don’t know what it’s like to succeed on merit, do you? You’re her favourite, you get everything handed to you.’
‘Her favourite?’ the Doctor scoffed. ‘That’s the first I’ve heard of it.’
‘She’s the reason you weren’t pulled back the minute you dropped the De-Mat. You should count yourself lucky.’
‘Lucky? Do you even know what that assignment was? Who the target was? He was a child, Gat.’
For a moment, there was silence. For a moment, the Doctor had hope that, for the first time, Gat would finally understand.
‘And you didn’t neutralise him.’
The Doctor’s hearts sank. ‘Neutralise? It’s a De-Mat. If I fired that thing, he wouldn’t have existed. An entire life erased like he was never there, a universe going on without someone who’s meant to be there.’
‘That was the point, Doctor. We had to stop what he was going to become. And you failed.’
‘An entire life! He was a good kid, an innocent kid!’
‘And that makes him exempt?’
‘Yes!’
Gat felt the wind send a chill along her neck. ‘That doesn’t change things. You had a mission, and you failed it.’
‘You and I have very different definitions.’
‘It’s not our only difference,’ she spat.
The Doctor smirked, ‘I suppose not. For a start, of the two of us, you’re the blunt instrument.’ The sight of Gat’s expression twisting with irritation pleased the Doctor more than she had anticipated. ‘You think fulfilling the objective is the only way to measure success.’
‘Don’t get pedantic, Doctor.’
‘It’s my prerogative. Now, shut up, I’m not done,’ she said, holding up an admonishing finger. ‘You wanted that boy erased. Neutralised, killed, whatever. And you all knew full well that I’d never do that.’
‘You’ve proven yourself to be unpredictable, Doctor,’ said Gat. ‘I’m not surprised. In fact, I’m surprised you didn’t surprise us. You love proving us wrong.’
‘I love doing the right thing. It just so happens that the right thing ends up being exactly what you lot don’t want—it’s a win-win,’ she shrugged. ‘But I didn’t fail the mission. He’s still alive, and that might annoy the bloodthirsty in the High Council, but the mission succeeded.’
‘And how did you reach that conclusion?’
‘The same way I made it happen. The same way you’re getting there and figuring it out. With words.’
‘Words?’
The Doctor nodded. ‘You said he would grow up to be totally evil. A ruthless dictator who would destroy millions of lives when his people made first contact with a visiting race. You sent me there, intent on disposing of him from afar. But I spoke to him—I made first contact.’
Gat’s eyes widened, ‘What?’
‘And we had a chat. He’s a nice kid. Don’t know what would’ve happened to send him down that path, but a good conversation works wonders.’
‘You can’t know that.’
‘Yes I can. I’ve got a little thing called a TARDIS, Gat. I jumped forwards to make sure. And, lo and behold, first contact went off without a hitch. Well, I suppose it’s “second contact” now…’
‘Doctor—’
‘What? Don’t believe me? Check in with her and she’ll tell you the same. Although,’ the Doctor leaned in to whisper, ‘she might not. You’re not her favourite, are you?’ With a curt chuckle, she spun on her heels and strolled away.
‘Doctor!’ Gat shouted. ‘You won’t get away with this!’
‘Already have, Gat,’ the Doctor called back over her shoulder. ‘That’s time travel for you.’